North American Dreaming: Our Candy-Coated World
William Burkholder's angry poem demands that we should see the world as it really is.
They want it raw and unadulterated.
They want it spit shined and happy,
like some toy doll Dorra or Willy Wonk wannas,
Sweet and confectioned until your eyes pop from the sugar overload.
Where is the real world?
Yes the real world where we close our eyes to murder mayhem and all the
other bloodcurdling bullshit going on around us.
We all want to live in a candy-coated world, where we see nothing, feel nothing--- plastic smiles mimicked on our lips, like cabbaged clones plastic, smiling empty degenerate grins, I refuse.
I smile when joy greets my day, my being, my life.
My eyes do not close, they never will to children dieing daily in neighborhoods
at home or in Dar-fur's barbed wire deserts.
I cry at the sounds of seven sets of black boots, tapping the daily cadence in Arlington's hallowed grounds, and in cemeteries across this country, yes I weep.
Our brethren dieing, while we smile and wrangle joy from this life in the most mundane of ways. Self centered wrought in our pleasures, while they sacrifice and die for our right to do so. Yes, I weep openly for them, but most of all I weep for all of us.
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